Step Up Together Drill Kits support interdisciplinary clinical teams to run emergency drills involving transfer of care.

Each Drill Kit can be used to run a Full Transfer Drill that begins in the community, travels by ambulance, and ends in the hospital or to run just one segment of the drill (e.g. before transfer or after hospital hand-off). The toolkit includes a standardized high-fidelity case designed to test the process of transferring a birthing person or newborn from one location to another with an interdisciplinary team involved in the care. Observation criteria and a Debriefing and Action Guide are provided to elicit continuous improvement of transfer processes and respectful care along the continuum.

Step Up Together Community Debriefs bring implementing teams from different sites together to maximize cross-learning and minimize reinventing the wheel. Each team goes through a structured process to reflect on best practices and areas for system strengthening.

Step Up Together™ is an interdisciplinary, community-led program advancing safety and equity across the spectrum of maternity care.

This program provides quality improvement training and education across the primary maternity care ecosystem, which includes community-based care models, outpatient care, home-based care, community hospitals, critical access hospitals, emergency medical services, transport services, and community service agencies.

Step Up Together embodies Primary Maternity Care’s values and priorities as a leading QI experts and maternity care thought-leaders. These priorities include creating safe space and nurturing community; implementation efforts with clear goals and feedback loops; dynamic education and learner experiences; plus practical data collection, analytic and implementation tools.

Step Up Together is intentionally designed to be adaptable to all perinatal settings and care models, and includes a signature Community Debriefing – our structured collaborative process to surface and disseminate lessons learned across implementation sites.

As QI experts in this realm, we invite the broader health care system to step up to make every pregnancy safe – no matter the setting.

The Focused Action Cycle is a condensed version of the Step Up Together Action Collaborative.

Both programs use Step Up Together Drill Kits to support teams to run emergency drills involving transfer of care, and both programs feature Step Up Together’s signature Community Debrief session, where teams share insights and learnings from their drill experiences to maximize collective learning.

In the longer Action Collaborative, teams receive ongoing group coaching in a series of sessions over 5-6 months to gain the skills and support to plan, conduct, and debrief their emergency drill.

In a Focused Action Cycle, there are just two group coaching sessions: a Kickoff and a Community Debrief, and teams self-manage the steps of planning, although they can access one-on-one coaching if they need additional support during or after the cycle.

Step Up Together Faculty are available to provide additional coaching to teams that need support to plan, conduct, or debrief the drill or who want help translating their drill experience into actionable quality improvement initiatives.

Coaching topics include:

• General Operations
• General Clinical Support
• Drill Planning Support
• Eligibility and Transfer Guidelines Support
• Transport Process Mapping and Review Support
• Case Review Support

Contact stepup@primarymaternitycare.com to request a coaching appointment and inquire about fees.

Yes! Practices and facilities need to conduct regular drills to maintain emergency preparedness. Focused Action Cycles provide the tools and accountability to stay on top of your drill cadence and minimize the work involved in preparing.

Yes, these drills can be adapted to diverse care settings, models of care, practice sizes, and levels of available time or resources. Whether your team is based in a small, community-based clinic, a large hospital, a birth center, or solo-practitioner home birth practice, Drill Kits are designed to be flexible and scalable to meet your needs.

Smaller practices or those with limited resources use Partial Transfer Drills to hone their roles in key scenarios that are most relevant to their team, population or practice, while larger interdisciplinary teams can take advantage of Full Transfer Drills. In addition to adjusting the scale and scope of the drills, they can be customized to your practice’s model of care, whether it’s midwifery-led or physician-led, building up to an integrated team approach. You can also modify the timing to fit into your schedule, whether that means conducting shorter, focused drills during routine team meetings or staff orientations, or dedicating a longer period to cover more comprehensive simulations.

In short, our drills are structured to accommodate real-world constraints while ensuring your team is better equipped to provide safe, effective care – all through improved team communication, preparedness, and coordinated response to emergencies.

If you’re unsure how to best adapt these drills for your specific setting, we can provide guidance and resources to help you tailor the drills to your practice’s unique circumstance. Email us at team@stepuptogethernow.com for more information.

A Focused Action Cycle is well suited for community birth facilities, birth centers or home birth practices that have really good relationships with their hospitals AND those still working on establishing and improving those relationships.

We recommend engaging in the program and starting to use the tools no matter where you are in the process.

You can run a mini-drill that takes place only in the community setting, and involves as few as 2 people. You may decide to make it part of your onboarding training.

We will support you towards an eventual goal of a full transfer drill (and improved communication and collaboration with your facilities and other transport partners!) but many participants modify and adapt the tools for their current scenarios and settings.